We Don't Need Another Hero

X González, one of the founders of March for Our Lives, explains the unsustainable life of today's reluctant celebrity-activist.

“It’s been almost five years since my classmates and I marched for the first time, and it’s hard not to feel like things are pretty much the same. Gun violence happens every day in this country.” That’s X González, one of the Parkland High School students, writing in New York magazine about their life since helping start March for our Lives and going through college.

They write: “I see my March for Our Lives compatriots at protests once or twice throughout the year. I’m still trying to figure out what type of activism I want to engage in, since I don’t want to be passive for the rest of my life but I cannot exist in the way that I used to. I don’t know how I’m alive after all that.”

Everyone concerned about the trajectory of political activism in America should read González’s essay, because it illustrates a broken, unsustainable model for mass engagement. González describes how what started as a locally-based, instinctive response to the Parkland massacre—a gun-control rally organized by the local school board—mushroomed explosively after it was broadcast live on CNN. González’s “I call B.S.” speech turned them instantly into a national celebrity. They write: “In the hours after I gave that speech, my name started trending on Twitter (which I then had to sign up for, because people started making accounts impersonating me), and celebrities started DM-ing me offering to fly me out to meet them. (None of them offered to fly to Parkland to meet us.) I was a senior in high school, waiting on college acceptances, and suddenly I was a voice in the fight for gun control.”

A month later, more than a million marched in Washington DC and in eight hundred sibling protests around the country. González shares this telling detail from a reception overlooking the Capitol after the rally: “A white-haired man who had clearly had a few drinks came up to me. With all the positivity in the world, he clapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Well, it’s on you kids now; we fucked it all up, and now it’s your job to fix it.’ How nice that must have felt for him, or for the countless people who would, in the coming years, say exactly the same thing to me, offloading the capacity to make change to us as a way of absolving themselves of their own role in America’s problems. How much pressure fell squarely on my shoulders with every hand that rested there, telling me to fix this problem, to take this chance and run with it.”

What a terrible nightmare—and that’s not even mentioning the efforts by Everytown for Gun Safety, Mike Bloomberg’s mega-gun violence group, to bigfoot the Parkland kids out of building their own base (which I wrote about in the Connector last year). González doesn’t go into the internal affairs of MFOL other than to note that some adults tried to control their behavior and others mainly offered logistical support. Instead, González writes about how they and their fellow activists slowly learned to beat back attempts by the mainstream media to extract their most emotional responses, and how they had to struggle to ask hard questions of politicians when producers at places like CNN tried to pick “the least controversial” ones in advance. (CNN producers have been doing this to young people ever since the first time kids were featured as question-askers at a presidential debate.)

To their everlasting credit, the MFOL founders steered themselves away from the media treadmill and set off on a different journey in the summer of 2018, crisscrossing the country registering people to vote, holding local town halls, calling out local politicians and most usefully, spawning and supporting hundreds of local MFOL chapters. Still, González shows that this work, too, was unsustainable, as it made all the Parkland kids into sponges for hundreds if not thousands of traumatizing life stories that local people shared with them of their own losses to gun violence:

“On the tour, I started to shut down. I ended up going to four funerals throughout 2018, and only one of them was because of the shooting. I kept my breakdowns to myself, silently sobbing whenever my emotions overcame me. At some point it even became hard to cry. That summer, I took one day off. I read for that entire day. I told the team, ‘I would actually like to skip this event tonight, sit on the bus, and read The Secret Keepers.’ I was still 18.”

Fortunately, González managed to decompress and find something of a more normal life these last four years at the New College of Florida (yes, the same alternative school that Governor Ron DeSantis is now moving to convert to an anti-wokeness factory). They also found their way to more politically radical ideas, which is evidenced not just by their social media posts but also by their speech at last summer’s DC rally after the Uvalde and Buffalo massacres, where they combined a call for stricter gun laws with a full-bore, obscenity-laced attack on Congress for “aiding and abetting an American nightmare that plagues everyone currently alive: our government can’t keep its hands off of women’s bodies, the poor and homeless are systematically rejected from society as the rich get unbelievably richer.” If you didn’t hear that message amplified, well, welcome to America, where corporate-owned mainstream media rarely lets anyone speak so broadly.

Reading González’s essay, I don’t think we should be surprised that Gen Z, the 18-29 year-olds who have grown up doing school shooter lockdown practice drills since they were pre-teen are the most alienated from mainstream two-party politics in America today. A Pew study last summer found that 47% wished for more parties with viable candidates, double the proportion among seniors. People who think Gen Z is going to keep helping Democrats block the rise of the MAGA right should not be complacent. A new Future of Politics Survey done by Business Insider with the University of Texas at Austin found that undergraduates’ views of both parties have gotten less favorable than a year ago—with the drop in enthusiasm more marked toward Democrats than Republicans.

And if you haven’t noticed, no, the passage of exceedingly modest but bipartisan gun control legislation last year hasn’t made a dent in the problem of gun violence. Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, has announced that she will step down after a decade of activism. Everytown has not started advertising for a replacement.

Related: Ten years ago on January 11th, internet rights activist Aaron Swartz took his own life. There have been a number of heartfelt pieces memorializing Aaron, who was a programming prodigy (who helped start Reddit and walked away from a fortune before it was sold), a protégé of Larry Lessig’s who helped build the software backbone for the Creative Commons movement, and a fierce proponent for open information and for fighting the powers that be.

Ryan Grim

of the Intercept wrote eloquently about Aaron’s legacy on his Substack this past week, elevating the importance of talking more openly about suicide. Not to take anything away from what Ryan wrote and what others posted about Aaron this past week, I would add this, as someone who knew him well (starting with our meeting at a Technorati hackathon in 2004 through years of collaboration in and around the Sunlight Foundation):

Aaron was a victim not just of depression but also of a false and dangerous idea, the myth of the lone activist hero. This predates the rise of tech, but no question Aaron was inculcated in the myth and saw himself acting as the brave lone wolf when he decided to hack MIT's JSTOR subscription on his own, which led to his prosecution. (Think of Carl Malamud, who made a big name for himself by digitizing SEC data, without permission, back in the 1990s and then giving birth to the EDGAR research service; or other info-warriors like Phil Zimmerman who invented Pretty Good Privacy or Julian Assange, who was already famous/infamous by the time Aaron walked into that MIT closet.) To me the lesson of his death isn't just that we need to talk about depression and suicide, but also that we need to kill the myth of the lone activist hero. Part of what made life so hard for Aaron after he was arrested was not just that the district attorney was putting the screws hard on him, but that he was all alone in what he did--this wasn't an act of collective civil disobedience and he was actively discouraged by the prosecutors from seeking public support, which must have only worsened his mental health. So it's my fervent hope that as we remember him and his promise, we also don't encourage people to emulate his approach. Think globally, act collectively.

Democratic Tech in Hedge Fund Hands

A year and a half ago, EveryAction, the Democratic fundraising software management company that also runs NGP VAN, the key data hub for Democratic voter data, was bought by Apax Partners, a British private equity firm. At the time, a lot of people worried publicly that the acquisition would lead to the hollowing out of this key infrastructure. Several top NGP VAN executives left the company, which was renamed Bonterra Tech. And now the other shoe seems to have dropped, with 10% of Bonterra’s workforce, 140 people, laid off a few days ago. “We fear the direction of our union-built platform—the largest database for Democrats, large unions, and many progressive nonprofits—under private equity” the CWA locals representing the laid off workers, tweeted. “So should you.”

An anonymous source inside Bonterra claims (via the @OrganizerMemes twitter account) that the job cuts fell disproportionately on trans or non-binary people, that the cuts were haphazard, that employees didn’t receive the 60 days notice required under California law, and that other employees have been removed recently after being assigned “impossible” metrics and forced out when they failed to meet them.

I have a different source who worked at NGP VAN in recent years and who remains in contact with Bonterra insiders who tells me that the VAN management people who were let go were “dead weight” and that their departure could pave the way for a “much needed” reorganization of the research and development arm of the company. That said, this source also says that they don’t expect Bonterra to invest in improving organizing, because the growth opportunities for the larger company are “entirely in the non-profit business lines, not the political ones,” and the VAN developer team inside the company currently doesn’t have a dedicated product manager. On top of that, Bonterra itself is dealing with a lot of internal chaos as its churns through CEOs. This source also says that whomever spoke to @Organizermemes is absolutely right that the DNC needs to invest directly in tools that support organizers rather than continuing to pay VAN for software they aren’t invested in improving. But, they add, “The problem is that the data sharing structure of VAN is so fucking complex that it creates a huge moat to ActionNetwork or the DNC themselves or anyone else building out such a product.”

Related: The digital fundraising space has gotten so crowded and spammy that one top vendor, Lloyd Cotler, the founder of Banter Messaging, who worked on texting programs for the Clinton 2016 campaign, tells his friends and family to write checks if they make political contributions so their email and phone numbers don’t recirculate endlessly on mailing lists. As Jessica Piper reports for Politico, congressional campaigns spent more on fundraising in 2022 than in the previous cycle, two-and-a-half times more than in 2018. “The incentives are all messed up,” Cotler adds.

Odds and Ends

—Whatever else you might say about the work of the January 6th select committee, it sure looks like it avoided really laying out what its investigators found about the role of social media in fostering the rise of the radical right. Why not? According to The Washington Post’s Cat Zakrzewski, Cristiano Lima and Drew Harwell (gift link), a strange-bedfellow alliance of Rep. Liz Cheney, a conservative who wanted to keep the focus on Trump, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat whose district includes Silicon Valley, kept Big Tech out of the cross-hairs. A draft 122-page memo was pared down repeatedly to just a handful of pages, and the final version of the committee’s work offered just a modest recommendation about the need for continued evaluation of media companies whose policies may radicalize their consumers, instead of a much tougher warning drafted by staffers that read, “Recent events demonstrate that nothing about America’s stormy political climate or the role of social media within it has fundamentally changed since January 6th.” Here’s the full draft memo. Given that House Republicans are now planning to hold hearings meant to demonstrate a supposed liberal bias at tech companies, when the January 6th committee apparently found the opposite, this omission may come back to haunt us.

—Progressive funder and strategist David Slifka has a plan called “Freedom Day” aimed at moving a critical mass of users off toxic platforms like Twitter and onto an open-source social media platform like Mastodon. Check out the details here.